Driving while Muslim or a terrible beginner’s mistake?

That’s an awful tragedy, I thought to myself. I remembered incidents from my own family’s driving history. My grandmother, who didn’t learn to drive until she was 60, once backed into someone’s living room. She drove another 27 years, never using her reverse gear. If she couldn’t pull forward, she didn’t drive there, wherever “there” was. My sister, while she still had her learner’s permit, once panicked in the middle of the freeway and stopped dead. I swear my dad came home with 20 new gray hairs. My dad alleged, although I’m not sure of the truth here, that my mom once tried a u-turn in the middle of a highway. I won’t even humiliate myself by retelling my own beginner errors. So student driver stories are always harrowing.

What made the above student driver story, one that involved six potential (although, so far, no actual) fatalities, a little more interesting to me was the driver’s name: Farhat Mohammad.

And that’s really all I know: One student driver, six people plowed under, and an interesting name.